Ocracoke Inlet

Ocracoke Inlet is water. There is no fabric here to conserve and never was: no fort, no garrison, no quay. The place is remembered for a single day in 1718 and for the geography that made that day possible.

The gap in the banks

Barrier islands move. Inlets migrate, shoal and close, so the channel a pilot read in 1718 is not the channel on a modern chart. Ocracoke is a natural geomorphological feature, the product of ongoing barrier-island processes, so it has no founding date; it was a passage before the golden age and stayed one after. What has not changed is the depth: the water is shallow and shoaling, as it was in 1718.

A Virginia operation in Carolina water

Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, judged Blackbeard a continuing menace and moved against him. North Carolina was a separate proprietary colony in which Spotswood held no authority. He conceived, financed and directed the expedition regardless, which gives the action its odd legal shape. The Royal Navy fifth-rates on the Chesapeake station, HMS Pearl and HMS Lyme, drew too much water for the Carolina inlets, so Spotswood hired two shallow-draught sloops and manned them from those two ships. Command went to Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Pearl.¹

The two hired sloops carried no gun between them, and the party was drawn from HMS Pearl and HMS Lyme: fifty-five men. The two are commonly named as the Jane, Maynard's own vessel, and the Ranger. Blackbeard's Adventure mounted swivels and at least some cannon. That settled the shape of the fight before it started: the attackers had to close and board or they had nothing, in water that would strand anyone who misread it.²

The action of 22 November

On 22 November 1718 they came on Blackbeard at the inlet. The pirate's guns did severe damage in the opening exchange. Maynard then put most of his men below decks, so that Blackbeard, looking at a sloop with almost nobody on her, boarded Maynard's sloop and met a rush of hidden sailors. He and Maynard exchanged fire and then blows in the press. Blackbeard was overwhelmed and killed, cut down at the last, in the usual telling, by a sailor's broadsword. The action itself is recorded separately as the Ocracoke fight.³

What Maynard did afterwards was the errand's whole point. The head was cut off and hung from the sloop's bowsprit, and the body was thrown into the sea. The head went back to Virginia as proof of the kill, and became one of the durable images of the suppression of piracy: colonial money, naval seamen and a deliberate overreach of jurisdiction, ending with a trophy on a spar.⁴

Who was there and who was not

The inlet had no fortification and no garrison. Government reached it from a distance, and in November 1718 it arrived as two hired sloops. Israel Hands was not at the battle; he was ashore at Bath, was taken and tried afterwards, and escaped the gallows by pleading the royal pardon. Charles Eden, Governor of North Carolina, had pardoned Thache, and Tobias Knight, a senior provincial official, had his dealings with the pirate investigated and was acquitted. One account names Edmund Hyde, midshipman and pilot of the Ranger, among the dead, and no other does. Surviving crew were carried to Virginia and tried before an admiralty court at Williamsburg in 1719, a sitting commonly dated 12 March; most were convicted and hanged.

Several men of African descent were among those taken with Blackbeard's company, and both the colony that sent the sloops and the colony that received the prisoners were slave-holding societies inside the Atlantic trade. Their names, status and fate are not recorded. No record has the inlet working as a slave-trading depot; it functioned as a channel and an anchorage.

Teach's Hole

The inlet is still a living waterway, and the harbour at the village of Ocracoke works on. Since the site is water there is nothing standing to protect, and the heritage sits in the toponym, in the event itself, and in local commemoration, including community observances marking the anniversary of the battle. Ocracoke also sells its Blackbeard association, energetically. No wreck of the Adventure has been confirmed in these waters. The excavated Blackbeard wreck is the Queen Anne's Revenge at Beaufort Inlet, a separate place down the coast.

What the sources cannot yet give is the earliest paper. The casualty figures for the action are not established; Maynard's own report and the official correspondence in the Colonial Office and Admiralty series at Kew would fix the first numbers. The names of the two sloops and the record of the Williamsburg trial want the same treatment. The eighteenth-century channel geometry, and any early settlement and pilotage arrangement around the inlet, are not documented in the sources consulted and would need the colonial North Carolina land and shipping records.